Murderland

by Garrett Cook

  Something tells me to take a run for the car. Then, to sit down and start it. Then, once it’s started to run down as many of these kids as possible. Yet that would be violence. I do not really like violence. I kill for a better, more peaceful world in which I will never have to kill again. This paradox makes me unable to determine whether or not it would be better to splatter all of these ridiculous creatures across the pavement and into a wet mass of capes and oozing eye makeup. The kohl puddle would just keep running down the sidewalk, a grey, tarry River Styx dividing the living from the dead. And my mind would find peace contemplating the deluge of gunk and circuitry. But, as a personal favor to Cass and maybe somewhat to society, I decide not to go maverick with the car right here and now. Sometimes it’s nigh impossible to do the right thing. Get in the car, splat, gunk, drive off. Not an option. I bite my tongue until it’s on the verge of bleeding and I stare at Cass’ outfit. Latch onto the precious little things that make your days tolerable. Especially when they’re all that keeps you from a human rights, autoinsurance and custodial nightmare. As scared, annoyed and angry as I am, I don’t make a move to leave, nor do I bother to tell Cass of my discomfort. Trapped like a rat, but don’t let on, Jeremy. Don’t let on or you’re completely fucked.

  So, I go back to looking at the freakshow, admiring the scenery, people every bit as garish and blinding as the expensive neon. Some rarer sights than you would ever find at Murderland. The Geins don’t go to Murderland too often. Clothed in plaid shirts and synthetic skin masks, they are even more morbid parodies of womanhood than the original Gein. I know there are a couple of these who paid extra for real human flesh. It makes the masks look less disgusting actually, in spite of the fact that these assholes went online to buy a woman’s face from some collector. Maybe those conservatives who say a cartoon cat with a sledgehammer is subversive and a war is healthy are right about how the real thing is better than the fakes. And I’m even realer than the Geins. Note to self; don’t follow this chain of logic to its end. Repetitive. Stay sane. Stay awake from circles. Point A to Point B. No Geins at Murderland, most of the time. Nor a lot of Harlequins. Most of the Gacys at Murderland don’t have the Commedia Dell’arte flamboyance. Just normal clownsuits, without the expressionism and flourishes of red, black or purple. And the girls at Murderland don’t do the lavish Gacy girl thing. Porcelain masks, little red dots on the cheeks, poofy skirts in harlequin colors.

  The Dark Ones are here in droves. Scouts and breeders alike examining the stock and getting ready to advance the invasion. No clue how long til the next wave, no clue how little time we have, but if this is any indication, page H8 doesn’t have the half of it. Clues are too few, evidence too abundant. If the second wave comes, we’ll all be too cold to feel it. Too dull and complacent to know that the sun has left our skies. The trees will be made of skin, take root in the ground and the grown ones, the real Dark Ones, the worst kind, will feast on them, snarling gibbering hungry things. They’ll plant us in the ground and we will grow toward the black sky, the only skin, the only life in silicon cities. Those who live, who aren’t used as food will wish they had never been born. I’m realizing it, it’s coming together and the scouts and the breeders are getting more stock tonight. We will be flesh to eat, gleefully stripped down to the circuits and planted in the terraformed ground to rise and bear our own fruits. But they never account for the presence of Jeremy Jenkins. American hero, serial killer, fraud and frightened social retard. What will these people do when the world is so much more violent than their fantasies?

  I don’t look forward to mingling. I don’t look forward to seeing Cass’ friends when I know all of these things. Some of them might even be nice, which makes it awkward knowing what’s happening. More than I don’t look forward to seeing Cass’ friends, I don’t look forward to Ian Sterling. Ian Sterling who Cass has come here to meet up with. Stupid Ian, stupid Reap, stupid website, stupid internet. Expert, guru, king of Reap critique. The man I’m walking into Le Couteau to see. This is the hell I go to for all of the people I had to kill for their own good. Remorse is hitting me so hard at the place where I am most justified. One of those experiences I don’t want to survive until the end of.

  We walk through the crowd and Cass greets person after person. I wonder who here she’s been with. I speculate regarding who might be an ex- boyfriend and who might be a one night stand and who she met once at a party. They’re all so friendly and not a one of them can keep his eyes on the girl he walked in with. Their hugs are a little too long and I see them struggling to keep their hands off her ass. I sit on my superiority, remembering that I met her at a production of Verdi’s Faust and they met her here. Their Lavish Costumes just as lavish and of a much higher culture. I can’t shake the jealousy and the sinking feeling that this sensation is just there to keep my mind off the pure, unadulterated social horror of the whole thing. A few girlfriends of hers talk about the Cabana Boy and how hard it was on them. They proudly point out a bucket for the charity Godless Jack started. Funny. Never have I wanted so much to take an enormous shit in a bucket.

  A guy in Godless Jack contacts puts his hand on her thigh and whispers something in her ear. I wince visibly. (To my credit, I hadn’t yet done so. I’m a very gifted actor). She misses both my wince and the snake-eyed apostate’s advances. She’s not a slut. She can ignore the cries of “hey, bait” and “wanna see the sharp?” She doesn’t want these guys, but I still feel strange about it all, as if I’m the one who is intruding on the intimacies of their flirting. How reprehensible for a boyfriend to stand in the way of some random drunk asshole’s good time. I wish that reminding me that Cass loves it here and is having fun were a little more consolation.

  The music is, at the moment, shapeless. It sounds like pounding and slicing. The grinding of a knife and the crunch of a hammer against bone. It turns shrill and becomes hard, unforgiving, unavoidable, the cock of an eager, uncompromising rapist. If I covered my ears they would gain no respite, since my mind would just take over and reproduce it continuously, as if a DJ were spinning records in my cerebellum. Knowing my brain, it would be worse, longer, faster, harder and more violent. Take more offense; feel the blows struck at the foundations of decency.

  Somehow they dance in spite of it. Ritual movements to appease the idols engraved in stained glass windows. Real and fictional alike, the killers look on. Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, Jack the Ripper, Albert Fish, Ed Gein and Michael Myers soak up the worship as lights shine against their graven images. The cult gyrates and moves with vicious thrusts that are punctuated with the brief erotic strangling of eager Whitechapel girls who thank those gods for their abuses. My eyes wander away from a disappearing Cass to a sight that I can take immediate pleasure in.

  Two Rip chicks are enjoying each other. A tall one with hair dyed a deep purple places her hat on a shorter brunette who wears a black corset done up with a series of red bowties. There’s almost nothing Victorian at all about her outfit save an open longcoat, but she still looks absolutely scintillating. So does the purple haired one, whose black, lacy bra is visible through a puffy men’s dress shirt. Her short skirt, complete with puffy petticoats, reveals long, slender legs clad in black stockings. She seamlessly places one of those legs between her smaller partner’s. Courtship? Ownership? Or just a dance? Impossible to tell. Long, spidery fingers sensuously work their way along the brunette’s arm and she follows their cues. The coat is discarded and the fingers are given bare shoulders to toy with. They stroke, they tickle and they move down to scratch the girl’s ample ass. She rubs against the scratching fingers and little red snakes of scar tissue appear. The cruel, gentle hands of the tall girl then fully grasp her hips. Their bodies grind and make elliptical shapes as the smaller girl’s lucky fingers grasp her partner’s thighs. I am not the only one watching this of course, but I am the only one who the tall girl acknowledges as watching her. The pain of all the guys flirting with Cass is numbed by the salacious smile she gives me.

&nbs
p; As if by a miracle, the grinding and painful music stops and a band moves to the center of the dance floor. A tall, pallid girl with a pink fright wig, silver lipstick, a chainmail evening gown, long fake silver fingernails and an eyepatch begins to sing to a slightly more pleasant synthbeat. A guitarist and bass player start to catch up and lo and behold, Penny Dreadful and the Aberrations themselves shine good luck down on my voyeuristic little scene with the Rip Chicks. Moved by the mellifluous voice of Penny Dreadful, the tall one leans down and her lips meet with those of the buxom little angel in her arms. I almost feel like myself. I know they want me to share this, to take in the scene and have a good time. Since I am here, and I am comfortable for a moment and I am part of something, it doesn’t feel like voyeurism, it feels like ESP.

  It feels like being the god who created the act. I try to remember when it was that I invented sex. Maybe it is megalomania, but I couldn’t care less, because it’s beautiful. I in my big, stupid cloak and they, my female counterparts, are savages and we are as beautiful as can be. Guys are wondering how it is I know these girls and why they occasionally turn their attention to me. I feel like I am bathed inside and out in hot cocoa. Subtle, comfortably sugary decadence. This should be wrong somehow. Maybe it is, because it doesn’t last. The sweet and the warm dry up in favor of a just-ran-out-of-hot water-in –your- morning- shower kind of feeling. Somebody stands between the staring, the sharing and the dancing. Somebody fucks up my evening just as I expected him to.

  From behind, the long cloak, the thick high-heeled boots and the shaved head make the figure look tough yet androgynous. The swordcane doesn’t hurt the image either. But then, he turns around and faces me. His black hair, half shaved is swept to one side. His face is in pale blue stage makeup with light purple eyeliner around one eye to make it look bruised. His lipstick is the color of the tall girl’s hair, and quite frankly, I think it looks ridiculous. When he turns around, everyone can also see the white corset he’s wearing, which is ripped and covered in bloodstains. Knowing this prick, the blood has GOT to be real. His black skirt has little circles cut in the middle to accentuate admirably toned legs. It’s a little skirt/chaps number that will be very popular at the club soon and I know this because HE is wearing it. Belligerently genderless. Violator, victim, Venus. The intention is as transparent as the wearer. The girls have stopped dancing to stare. My tall, supple dancer stops and wraps an arm around his waist.

  “Evening, Selene,” he says.

  “Evening, Ian.”

  He kisses her and effortlessly throws his attention from her. And I am the reluctant recipient of this dubious gift.

  “The boots are quite a nice touch, Jeremy. Classic.”

  I try so desperately to find a way to care less what Ian Sterling thinks of my outfit. I try, but it doesn’t happen. There is, in fact, no way in which I can care less, but I have come to realize from hanging out with some of Cass’ friends that sometimes a man must say things that make him want to projectile vomit into the mouth of the person he’s talking to in such a way that maybe the asshole will choke to death. For me, I knew Le Couteau would be made of these moments.

  “Why, thank you, Ian. Cass picked out the boots. And you…your outfit. It’s amazing. Where did you get it?”

  He replies, and fortunately, I can locate the “off” switch of my perceptions. I am thankful that I don’t have to hear a word of it. I am so glad that I’m somebody who doesn’t want to listen to anything this insufferable dickhead has to say. Almost nobody else seems to have that luxury. Especially not Cass. With her stupid scrapbook of his columns and those tapes of his interviews. I can’t be annoyed enough by this, and I remind myself every single time I see him. I know I’ve written it often enough, but I hate that scrapbook and I … hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate … Ian Sterling.

  I ignore the words but still I end up watching his mouth and when that happens, he becomes impossible to ignore. Nanites. So many Nanites. Little metal spiders, ants, roaches and earwigs begin to crawl out. They wriggle down onto his shoulders and then jump down to the dance floor scattering swarms and swarms and swarms. Each word is ten thousand more. We want to retain composure, Jeremy and I, but we … but I can’t quite make it at first. Our eyes my eyes feel like they’re bulging out several inches. I know my eyes and the sockets they come in aren’t even that big aren’t even half that big but they feel compelled to participate in this grotesque cartoon. Robots and wild beasts. Human ain’t a choice. In fifty, twenty, hell, five years when we fill out applications will the race column only have “ROBOT” and “SHARK”? Robots and wild beasts only, they dance and they don’t begin to notice what is burrowing into their skin and the things that crawl into their ears. Stops briefly. We are relieved that there are words and not vermin now. I know that I can’t quite be hallucinating, although I know that I can’t be sane. But I have to think I’m sane right now, because if I don’t think I’m sane, then I won’t act sane; and if I act insane in front of this guy, the shit will come down and he’ll know how I’m responding to the plague of nanites that he might be spreading. Not might be. Doubt is one of their tools. Doubt is what they’ll use to bring me down if I’m not careful. Don’t let him know what you’re doing, don’t act like you know what he’s up to.

  “Jeremy, where’s Cass?”

  I muster a shrug, but it’s a sane regular guy kinda shrug. Ian looks around and it is only seconds before he has made eye contact. She comes over and I expect at least a kiss on the cheek or for her to wander to my side, but she walks right up to Ian and she hugs him. No, not hugs, she embraces him. She embraces him tightly. She embraces him and everything that he does, not knowing about the insects that he drips. Dark One Type F. Hive Mother. Modified Breeder possessing a human shape. Corruptor? Nanite factory. Could that really be where they all come from? No, he’s not one of them. Think about your personal prejudice. Think reasonably. He just doesn’t know about the robots and the danger and the trees made of flesh reaching toward the sky. All of them have the luxury of being ignorant and therefore being able to enjoy themselves. But, we can kill them to make things right, we can kill them in order to maintain order and in the hope that some of us will keep our souls when so many seek to take them. Is he really so fucking special that I should spare him in spite of the gears and the silicon and the myriad beasties that come out of his mouth? Stupid column, stupid scrapbook. Stupid Cass for getting so much joy from him. I can’t even rid the world of Ian fucking Sterling. Ian who has quite likely fucked and might still be fucking my girlfriend. Maybe that’s what she does on my poker nights.

  “The problem with the Venti was the need to remain, at least in part, gentle and meek; a large part of them had to be devoted to acting and thinking like something they weren’t. Yet, today’s reaper need know no such boundaries. The natural weakness of people like Gacy was that they had this insincere public pseudolife to maintain, but that isn’t a concern considering that we now have professional reapers who can make Psychopomping their lifestyle. But, the tragic thing about the pathology of madness is that often reapers create the boundaries for themselves.”

  This part of his sanctimonious philosophical spew, which he says at (and not to) Cass stands out in particular. Even a broken clock’s right twice a day. Although, I think Godless Jack Cavanagh might have said something to that device in The Human Predator. But then, even I quote Godless Jack sometimes, sadly enough. I feel the sting of my secret identity tonight. Even worse now that I’m in a costume that I have put on over my normal person costume. Now Penny Dreadful and the Aberrations are walking out and the music returns to the synthbeat and the chainsaw whirring. I feel like I could easily become one of those celluloid idols engraved in the stain glass, that the real and violent me is calling again and it still might be wrong to hold it back. Is this a chainsaw that I see before me? A chainsaw of the mind, a false c
reation…yet if I make it public, it will only get teenagers laid. Don’t listen to what Ian says don’t think of Ian. Think of Cass, and not of Cass and Ian.

  “The outfit’s exquisite,” Cass says, waiting for a hole in his shoptalk, yet not willing to interrupt him, “Choke you bad?”

  “Gasping. But the effort was the real problem. Oh, you wouldn’t believe the hell I’ve been through getting this together and with all the interviews and the retrospectives this week…”

  One nugget of wisdom from Ian and a brief scrutiny of Cass’ small talk lead me back to my prior solution to my awkward situation: ignoring Ian and letting his words blend in with the equally offensive and vapid noise around him. I catch little fragments of what Cass has to say. Things like “I didn’t think you two were speaking” and “I can’t believe HE was at Murderland!” But, it ends with a deafening thud when Cass says, “But the 84 killer’s smalltime. Why would you be looking into that?”